fri 07/02/2025

tv

Line of Duty, Series 6, BBC One review - fasten your seatbelts, it's back

Adam Sweeting

Jed Mercurio’s tangly police corruption thriller Line of Duty has become one of the jewels in the BBC’s drama crown, and this sixth (and possibly last) series has finally arrived on BBC One after a steadily growing crescendo of pre-publicity. Can it live up to the hype?

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My Father and Me, BBC Two review - Nick Broomfield's moving voyage around his family

Tom Birchenough

Nick Broomfield made his first film 50 years ago, and his career over those five decades (and some three dozen works) has been as distinctive, and distinguished as that of any British documentary maker.

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Drive to Survive, Season 3, Netflix review - the agony and the ecstasy of the 2020 F1 campaign

Adam Sweeting

The 2020 Formula One season was all set to start in Australia last March when it was derailed by the Covid emergency. The F1 organisers insisted that they’d get the racing back on track somehow, and what sounded like foolhardy bravado was justified when they successfully staged a 17-race championship between July and December.

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The One, Netflix review - the downside of scientific matchmaking

Adam Sweeting

Readers of John Marrs’s 2017 novel The One should probably look away now, since Netflix’s dramatisation of the story bears scant resemblance to the book.

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Grace, ITV review - sun, sea and skulduggery in sunny Brighton

Adam Sweeting

We last saw John Simm on ITV in 2018’s Hong Kong-based murder mystery Strangers, a product from the Jack and Harry Williams script factory which wasted its exotic backdrops with a plot which mooched about in a dispirited fashion before dozing off entirely.

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Unforgotten, Series 4, ITV review - is the familiar formula wearing thin?

Adam Sweeting

There comes a time when every successful formula can do with an overhaul, and that particular bell may be tolling for Unforgotten (ITV).

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Deutschland 89, Channel 4 review - the Wall comes down, what next?

Tom Birchenough

Joerg and Anna Winger’s gripping drama of East Germany, a loose portrait set over the final decade of that country’s existence, has reached its culmination, and this first episode of Deutschland 89 landed us right in the unpredictable maelstrom of history.

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The Terror, BBC Two review - nightmare in the Arctic wastes

Adam Sweeting

Admittedly, Antarctic explorer Captain Scott was at the other end of the earth from the protagonists of The Terror (BBC Two), but they would surely have concurred with his anguished observation: “Great God! This is an awful place.” Based on Dan Simmons’s novel, The Terror is a fictionalised account of the 1845 attempt by Sir John Franklin to find the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific via the Arctic Ocean.

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Your Honor, Sky Atlantic review - Bryan Cranston suffers fear and loathing in New Orleans

Adam Sweeting

Nice to find Bryan Cranston taking the lead in a TV series again (this is his first since Breaking Bad ended in 2013), and the role of New Orleans judge Michael Desiato fits him like a well-tailored suit.

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Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry, Apple TV+ review - sprawling account of the singer's rise to superstardom

Adam Sweeting

The Billie Eilish story is a paradigm of pop music and marketing, 2020s-style. Eilish’s instinctive talent became evident when she was barely into her teens, and she flourished with the support of a close-knit and musical family.

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